1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for producing an image data flow that defines a flow of processing applied to image data.
2. Description of the Related Art
In document management and content management, there is a tool application that automatically forms a workflow corresponding to a business process. For example, there are products such as Adobe Livecycle Workflow (registered trademark) of Adobe (registered trademark). With the products, it is possible to integrate a process on a document basis with a basic business application of a company such as document management. It is possible to realize efficiency of a business process based on documents by defining a workflow of the documents and performing automatic production of a workflow, management of a workflow, and association with existing business applications.
In recent years, a function for customizing a function that an MFP (Multi Function Peripheral) serving as an image forming apparatus has is provided. Examples of the function that the MFP has include image processing based on an “image data flow” that defines a flow of processing applied to image data.
However, combinations of image data flows in the MFP vary depending on users. Thus, conventionally, there is no way but to define and embed all the image data flows in the MFP or select image data flows frequently used by a large number of users to limit the number of image data flows and set the image data flows in the MFP.
In the MFP, intermediate image data is treated because of an image processing ASIC and image processing software. Thus, in order to realize an image data flow desired by a user, it is necessary to design, taking into account performance, an image quality, and the like, an image data flow that processes the intermediate image data. Conventionally, the design of such an image data flow is performed by a design engineer of an MFP vendor and is laborious work that consumes time for optimization.